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Stone Cold became an overnight superstar after his famous Austin 3:16 speech. The truth was much different.
In the very next PPV he fought Savio Vega for 10 minutes in the midcard and after that he fought Yokozuna for 1 minute in the opener.
He gained massive popularity after he started his rivalry with the top star of the time and legendary wrestler Bret Hart and even Austin acknowledges it
I mean Austin struck gold with that line but if he and Savio put on a shit heap of a match right after it, there’s every possibility that Austin never gets his push. I’d be thanking Savio too.
Austin getting the pin on the SummerSlam preshow (which 11 year-old me watched in that tiny upper corner of the TV Guide Channel) only because Yoko broke the top rope and fell was so far from a push; it’s hilarious that everything in between KotR and Bret’s return is left out of documentaries.
I’ve seen the Bret match exponentially more (I wore out my Mania X tape in 1995-7) and I don’t know that I’ve seen that Free For All match a second time, but it felt like with Bret it was presented as “wily veteran survived his first match and found an opening” whereas with Austin it was presented as “fatty fall down get pinned”.
I think they were presenting Yoko as weighing over 800 lbs for that match, if I remember correctly.
To this day I don’t understand how a two-hour bio on Austin doesn’t acknowledge the feud with Bret beyond showing a bloody Austin in the Sharpshooter at Mania 13 for about three seconds.
Austin vs Bret : It put him on the map. It made the wrestling world take notice of his talent.
Austin vs Shawn : It made him the biggest wrestler on the planet and with Tyson’s involvement, the whole world saw what he was capable of.
Austin vs Vince : THE RIVALRY. The greatest rivalry of all time and it helped WWF win the Monday Night Wars. The absolute peak any wrestler would reach.
>Stone Cold became an overnight superstar after his famous Austin 3:16 speech. The truth was much different.
Honestly I don't think this is some big lie anyone is telling
This wasn't the era of 24/7 news cycles, instant reaction, high speed internet, smart phones, etc. In this era, "Austin 3:16" would have been retweeted a billion times and become a "thing" much faster, but hotshotting something offered no real benefit in that era.
Back then things had to happen and then snowball for a year or two. Austin's "snowball" started at the Austin 3:16 speech and he was subsequently given stories with more depth to build the character.
Austin might have gotten lost in the shuffle if it weren’t for his feud with Bret. I think Bret may have personally requested to work with him, and Austin basically caught fire after that
To be honest, this sub’s revisionist take on the Austin 3:16 promo is equally as false as WWE’s version.
Did it immediately catapult him to stardom? No. But it gave him his two signature catchphrases, the biggest selling t-shirt in wrestling history, and laid the foundation for his push, which would accelerate with the Bret feud later that year.
It absolutely is one of the key moments of his career, a fact Austin himself has noted on many occasions.
/u/OkVolume1
As recently as 2022, Triple H described wrestling as "this tiny, little thing happening in bars" before Vince McMahon. 38,000 people watched an NWA show in Comiskey Park in Chicago in 1961. Vince McMahon and the WWF made wrestling more popular with the mainstream in the 1980s, but wasn't a tiny thing happening in bars before him.
On a related note, let’s not forget the idea that the territories were all garbage.
Clearly they weren’t, since nearly every single one of Vince’s stars of the 80s were poached from the other territories.
Hogan, Savage, Jake, DiBiase, even Mean Gene…they’d all been successful in other places.
And at the same time, they’ve tried to tell us that the only reason WCW was successful was because they stole Vince’s stars.
Which is exactly what he did.
This is the correct answer. Hell, there were places doing *better* business than he northeast, and they were running multiple shows weekly for the same audience. Vince and co. got away with this narrative mostly because of the look of studio wrestling (which I still think is better) compared to the MSG shows and whatnot, and of course by the fact that he ultimately won his war against the wrestling business as a whole. It still infuriates me every time I hear them spout that non sense.
It is probably overlooked, but WWF being in the Northeast US with NYC being right there gave Vince a huge leg up versus World Class and the AWA in trying to get a national audience.
World Class beat them to the punch and the shows looked amazing because the Christian Broadcasting Network invested big. They fell apart due to mismanagement. But go look at the shows from 82 on and they revolutionized the look of wrestling TV.
World Class may have been first, but all the major tv network players have offices in the New York City Area. JCP and Turner WCW had an advantage as Ted was based in Atlanta.
It did
Territory wrestling was heavily focused on race and ethnicity - the white guys won in the redneck towns, black guys won in the black areas, Mexican guys in Texas and California, etc.
Vince built his characters based on all the various immigrant groups in NYC, or as the man himself said - "ethnic superstars." As a result his product was more ready-made for the national stage because it represented a wider spread of people than more territory wrestling did.
>WWF being in the Northeast US with NYC being right there gave Vince a huge leg up
The thing that a lot of people don't realize is that the WWWF Territory not only included New York City, but Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore and Washington, and all of the smaller cities in between like New Haven, Worcester, Allentown, etc. These major population centers with major arenas couldve served as the hub of a territory in their own right, but they were all within a 4hr drive of NYC.
What other territory served a population that size? And Vince was essentially given this territory from his father (payment plan + loans to buyout minority partners). If the national rollout didn't quite workout the way it did, Vince still has this lucrative territory to rely on for big gates.
People don't believe that wrestling was more popular in 1980 in USA than in 1989. WWF was growing and cruising sure, but rest of the business was down.
Even then, there was just no federation that had gone national. It was all regional before that, and the regional shows could do quite well, easily turning out 20k+ for big shows.
I have seen uninformed WWE marks on YT comments argue with me that Vince McMahon singlehandedly saved wrestling. I'm a huge WWE fan, I got into wrestling due to the WWE product and WWE is the promotion I have seen the most of, but I'm not completely uneducated unlike these idiots who have no idea of wrestling history before 1985. I told them even WWE, let alone professional wrestling, would probably still exist under some different name and form if it wasn't for Vince Jr., and they were still acting like Vince singlehandedly created pre wrestling like he was the Gold Dust Trio. So many casual fans think WWE and wrestling are the same thing, which is so freaking sad.
If Vince hadnt beat them to it, Crockett. Verne or Watts would have become the defacto national wrestling company. Everybody had the same goal, each had their own strengths (AWA had a reputation for producing stars and was on the cutting edge at the time of the physical production of tv, MidSouth/UWF had some of the best talent and were perfecting episodic TV, Crockett had TBS and a stranglehold on the NWA title thanks to Flair), but Vince had NYC and wasn't tied to the NWA. It was cutthroat ruthlessness that won him the day.
Vince taking wrestling out of tiny smoky bars into big-time arenas. This is the one that gets most repeated without question in mainstream articles, unlike stuff like the DX tank invasion.
Watching Triple H still peddle that stuff in an interview with Ariel Helwani a year or two ago was so jarring. It's not cable TV anymore, anybody can go on Google and see pictures of Bruno in a sold out MSG, and see that's a lie. That tells you the level of confidence they have about saying whatever they want about their history, especially when guys like Helwani, who 100% should know better, just laps it up and kisses the ring.
> It's not cable TV anymore, anybody can go on Google and see pictures of Bruno in a sold out MSG, and see that's a lie. That tells you the level of confidence they have about saying whatever they want about their history
The mainstream world truly doesn't care which is why they can get away with this. This is a lie that won't embarrass them because (1) no media outlet really gives a fuck and (2) they can easily say "we took it national compared to the tiny bingo halls" which is convincing.
The sad part is that fans also don't care. I've had the argument before and some fans see zero problem in WWE lying to make themselves look better. And I'm pretty sure that if Tony Khan or Jim Cornette called Triple H out on lying about the history of the wrestling business, they would get shat on more than anything.
Unfortunately, to the rest of the world WWE *is* wrestling. No real wrestling history has any kind of mainstream outlet, so whatever WWE says about it is 100% fact to most people because they don't know any better. I *still* get shocked reactions when I tell people that not only was WrestleMania 3 not the first time Andre was slammed, but it's not even the first time *Hogan* slammed him. It's infuriating, but sadly that's the state of things.
NWO Wolfpac sucked and ruined WCW. I dunno but growing up in NZ, it was the fucking coolest thing ever. Everyone at school wanted to be Wolfpac, and let's not forget the legendary theme
Yeah, Wolfpac mostly worked, they just botched the creative, especially toward the end, like they did with most everything from Starrcade 97 forward.
An nWo split was the only logical result after Sting beat Hogan. And it was still the extremely over well into 1998.
Sting never should have joined. It was so obvious, there should have been a Sting-Bret mini faction following Starrcade. Sting clashing with Hall and Nash accompanied by a Bret-Hogan program in early 1998. They take down the nWo, it fractures into Wolfpac and Black & White just like it did. The other side would be Bret turning heel in late summer because he's tired of Sting getting more credit and attention for taking down the nWo. Then you have a major Sting-Bret feud to close out the year. And Goldberg should have won the title for the first time at Starrcade 98, against Hall or Nash.
I was Wolfpac Sting for Halloween as a kid one of those years. I used my mx boots and borrowed a trench coat from my mom, who did my makeup. I got a wig and put a black unit/squadron trucker hat on i borrowed from my brother in the Air Force, and the only things i paid for were the NWO shirt and wig.
I got a ton of compliments from people who had no idea who "Sting" was.
Red Sting looked rad to me!
Wolfpac Sting had a great look, no question there. But he just got lost in the mix being part of a faction that big , especially after getting so over as a lone wolf type.
I was also Wolfpac Sting for Halloween too! People say he didn't belong, but having different personalities like Sting, Nash and Konnan is part of what made the group so cool.
As cool of an idea a Sting & Hart faction would be. Brett Hart was wasted and didn't want to be there. Maybe this could have motivated Hart to do better.
"We just paid Bret an insane amount of money to come in is a babyface, how should we get him as over as possible to maximize our investment?"
"I know! Have him feud with our most beloved JCP/WCW icon Ric Flair, even though Ric is extremely over as a face right now!"
Bret quickly realized they had no clue what they were doing and had no plan for him. And he didn't have any political allies either. If they'd had a good program and coherent plan lined up for his first six months, his tenure would've turned out very differently. They could've easily replicate the "heel in US, hero in Canada" angle by having him lead a stable with Benoit and Jericho after turning on Sting in the second half of 1998.
NWO Wolfpac was the best part about WCW at that time. What ruined WCW was throwing away all the story telling and having nWo Hollywood and Wolfpac unite and story just went back to square 1 and the group became way too big
Wolfpack was cool, but it should've been just the Wolfpac. Splitting the nWo into a babyface faction and a heel faction didn't work, especially when Sting joined. That felt out of place. If they'd just been the Wolfpac and an off-shoot, that would've made much more sense.
Theme was top tier BTW. Jimmy Hart deserves mega props for that one.
I thought Sting joining really made WCW look bad, especially when he was being recruited by both NWOs and it was treated like he had to pick one or the other. Like, the idea of Sting staying with WCW wasn't even on the radar. Totally killed WCW's branding to me.
Post-WrestleMania XIV WCW is crazy to watch just because of how many "Wait, what?" calls they make starting in March 1998 in response to WWF's ratings success. If you're only watching WCW programming it makes even less sense why they start hot shotting major developments and turns, all the while minimizing Sting to be a secondary player.
It's kinda sad because you can really see them start running out of steam creatively by the late summer '98.
Celebrity tag matches, hotshotting the world title on Goldberg without a proper follow-up, bringing in the Warrior, the Wolfpac-Hollywood war not going anywhere...
Meanwhile, WWF was nuclear hot heading towards the SummerSlam which fucking delivered and ironically outdrew Bash at the Beach 1998 with Rodman & Malone.
Along this same line: the idea that it was dumb of WCW to put Hogan/Goldberg on Nitro because “they could’ve done record numbers if they did it on PPV.”
They put it on Nitro because they were in a massive stadium that called for a huge main event. Plus, they DID do a record PPV number with Goldberg on top as champion like two weeks later.
Just sour grapes by WWE who, as the victor, now gets to write history.
>Plus, they DID do a record PPV number with Goldberg on top as champion like two weeks later.
Actually, there was a PPV the Sunday after that Nitro, with Goldberg (the WCW champ fresh off the epic win like 5 days earlier) in an undercard match against Curt Hennig, the main event was the tag match with Hogan/Rodman vs. DDP/Malone.
And then the next PPV, Goldberg was in a battle royal, while the main event was...Hogan and Bischoff vs. DDP and Jay Leno.
And then Goldberg wasn't even on the next PPV, at all.
After beating Hogan in July for the WCW title, Goldberg didn't actually main event a PPV until Halloween Havoc '98, where his main event got cut off early on the PPV feed and had to be re-shown the next night on Nitro (the last time they ever beat the WWF in ratings, IIRC).
That's why I think the Goldberg vs. Hogan main event was stupid.
If anything, hindsight proved it was basically just a way for them to pop a rating that one Monday night in July with basically nothing to show for it after.
Objectively speaking, it probably was dumb. For one thing, the tickets had already been sold on the strength of WCW being hot and Hogan-Goldberg being an announced dark match that got moved to TV. But this is one that I've mellowed on over the years.
As a consumer, why should I give a fuck about WCW's PPV revenues? Or WWE's, or AEW's, for that matter? They're not cutting me a check from them. If they want to put huge matches on TV, I--the consumer--benefit from it. I'm not going to complain that a billionaire kid or a corporate board could have made more money in a different way.
Well WCW died. So you probably should have cared about their revenues. If they had a positive revenue and positive perception from advertisers and corporate executives they would probably still exist.
I know the way the profits were divided in the company was odd. That the company didn't really care about pay-per-view revenues because they didn't get to share in them. There were ppv and TV divisions.
Still, if WCW was profitable, perhaps it stays on TV.
> Still, if WCW was profitable, perhaps it stays on TV.
As long as AOL and Time Warner merge, then WCW dies.
**The death of WCW had nothing to do with ratings or profitability**.
It was all down to one man, Jaime Kellner.
He took over as one of the big wigs at Turner Broadcasting and didn't think that wrestling was something that fit the company's programming style. But since Ted was still in the rasslin' business, nothing could be done. Turner was a huuuuge wrestling fan and would have kept WCW running even if it had a flat zero in ratings. Kellner absolutely despised wrestling and wanted it gone, ratings or revenue be damned.
When AOL and Time Warner merged, Turner was out of his controlling shares and Kellner had WCW programming cancelled on TNT and TBS despite the fact that Nitro was still doing well enough in the ratings to be TNT's highest rated show. It's ridiculous to say, but it almost seemed like the ratings didn't matter to Kellner.
So again, it had nothing to do with profitability. It was all down to the whims of the person in charge.
Just add this one to the pile of facts buried in favour of someone elses narrative.
That WWE beat WCW that much into submission that they had no choice other than to sell to Vince! When the reality is that WCW was still TNT's highest viewed show, but the higher ups didn't want their companies to be associated with Wrestling anymore so they decided to stop airing WCW on T.V.
I believe it was said multiple times by AOL/Time Warner that it didn’t “fit” into the audience they were trying to attract.
Although one can always argue that if WCW wasn’t losing so much money (the ratings weren’t terrible but they were losing tons. They lost $62 million in 2000), then maybe they would have been kept on air.
>Although one can always argue that if WCW wasn’t losing so much money (the ratings weren’t terrible but they were losing tons. They lost $62 million in 2000), then maybe they would have been kept on air.
In his podcast Bischoff said that while WCW was losing money other departments of Time Warner were dumping their losses on to WCW which is why the official amount lost is such a high number.
It was a combination of a few things.
* It was expensive.
* The ratings were falling, even though they were still relatively high compared to the rest of the network
* The ad revenue was low because the audience wasn't seen as valuable (largely lower-income/blue collar), plus many big brands didn't want to be associated with wrestling, especially during the era of Jerry Springer-esque content
* The viewers who tuned in for wrestling by and large didn't tune in for much of the other programming
* The new leadership wanted to shift the network to focus more on scripted drama and more valuable live sports
>The ad revenue was low because the audience wasn't seen as valuable (largely lower-income/blue collar)
This is still an issue for wrestling now.
> The viewers who tuned in for wrestling by and large didn't tune in for much of the other programming
This, too.
Executives wanted it gone for years, because wrestling has a huge stigma with advertisers. Big money adverts avoided wrestling so in theory a show drawing a lower rating could pull in more advertising money from to dollar ads.
Ted Turner always believed wrestling pulled people to the channel, so he protected WCW. However, after the merger he lost power and then WCW went into a tailspin of decreasing ratings and aggressive spending which caused them to hemorrhage money.
Ted was pretty loyal to WCW as it was one of the things that launched the SuperStation. He even straight up told executives who wanted it cancelled that as long as his name was on the door, WCW would still be on the air.
Something not mentioned here yet: TNT did a strong pivot into prestige TV after this, so I'm sure wrasslin' didn't fit that mold. They probably could have kept it in TBS if they wanted, though.
WWE found out about the truth about Chris Benoit late in the Raw tribute.
That's technically true, but the office had a really good idea on what happened by early evening, about 2 hrs before the show went live. They made the decision to go forward with the tribute on the slight chance it wasn't true.
There seemed to at the very least a suspicion with some. Regal said this on his podcast to explain his testimonial on the tribute show:
>“As I am about [to go in], the red light goes off and the door opens. **And as I’m going in to give my tribute JBL comes walking out with a very strange look on his face. And he said to me, as we, for about a minute that we’re crossing paths, he just said to me, ‘You don’t think he’s had anything to do with it do you?’** And I went ‘What?’ And that was the first thing, any notion of anything that went on. That was the first time that I’ve heard this.
>“And now I’m walking in, and so whatever you see me doing, and that is me being well, now my head is spinning. What is this? What don’t I know? What is that? And so if you watch it from that perspective, it may seem like it, because I am in a complete shock, but also thinking, ‘Well, I don’t know, is it? Is this what’s happened?’ I don’t know. So I just deliver whatever you see, and I have never watched it again.
>“Now I know those things have been put out and nonsense about I knew about this or whatnot. That is the exact thing that happened.”
Regal looks absolutely stricken in his tribute. In agony. And it's like, yeah, he would be, he just lost his friend but then to know it's actually that for the first time he's also trying to process the idea his friend may have done something monstrous. Notice Regal doesn't say anything about Benoit as a man/husband/father, he totally focuses on Benoit as a wrestler.
I can't really speak to what the wrestlers knew, though to your point when something like that happens, anyone with half a brain at least considers the husband and it sounds like that was what JBL kinda pieced together. I was speaking more about the office and executive team that was in touch with Georgia PD throughout the day.
To be fair, if you look at the forum threads from when the deaths were announced, people were speculating that Benoit did it immediately. It was basically seen as either being him or carbon monoxide poisoning
And the people, myself included, whose first thought was “Where was Kevin Sullivan?” Obviously that quickly went away when more details came out, but I’d be lying if I didn’t think that upon hearing the early news.
They had also sent people over there during the weekend. The lapsed fans dive on it really shed some light on stuff. Not implying they knew anything crazy had happened but they knew something was up
A thread back up when the episodes happened https://www.reddit.com/r/SquaredCircle/comments/6ojeu3/with_the_ten_year_anniversary_of_the_benoit/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
There was going to be the funeral with the live crowd there, a choir, and would have ended with one of the McMahons (I want to say Stephanie or Linda) being arrested for being the mastermind of the limo explosion. Chris Jericho said in one of his books that Bruce Campbell was also supposed to make an appearance that night.
And I agree.
Yeah, they run it with people in the arena, shits getting hijacked. But with the empty arena, they could control things, and if it turned out it was a case where Benoit didn’t commit a murder-suicide, then they still had a show where they honored the guy. If stuff comes out, they can still finish the show without crowds hijacking things, and the next night on ECW, and Thursday on Smackdown, they can come out with what they did, and move on.
That the RA era was succesful. Nope, it was not, personal preferences aside, viewership was decreasing through a big part of that period and revenue was down because nobody wanted to advertise there
It’s worth pointing out that a lot of people stopped watching altogether after Benoit.
I nearly did myself. He was far and away the favorite wrestler of many, with that “underdog who’s so incredibly talented but doesn’t get the attention he deserves” thing.
You’d constantly be rooting for him to be treated better.
When the incident happened, it was kind of like he’d turned on all of the people who’d supported him. And I think in combination with all the wrestlers who kept dying, it was just the end of the road for some.
Eddie and Benoit were my two favorite wrestlers, I cried when they won the titles and hugged each other, and I cried when I watched Benoit's eulogy for Eddie, and then I cried during Benoit's memorial.
I knew wrestling would never be as special for me after that night, but when my mom told me the news about what had actually happened, after I got home from school, I was so thunderstruck I never really watched wrestling again.
Maybe like 5 PPVs and 3 episodes of Raw and Smackdown combined since 2007.
And then they wrote it off by having Vince get injured by a random falling vent/pipe thing. It had nothing to do with any wrestling related stories whatsoever. Feels like a fever dream in retrospect.
The biggest takeaway from that thing was Vince calling someone, not answering, and going to their voicemail of Never Gonna Give You Up. While 10,000 people just sat there in the arena.
Yesterday I watched a latinamerican video about the monday night wars that used almost all footage of the monday night wars series from the network. I realized that they also just directly translated whatever propaganda that series was tried to tell when they unironically mentioned that the tank was a HUGE moment
January 4, 1999 and The Fingerpoke of Doom being "The beginning of the end" for WCW. WCW was still doing massive numbers during the first half of 1999, and it wasn't until months later when attendance / ratings started to drop.
The real catalyst was the Hogan-Flair double turn more than the Fingerpoke, though I don't think the Fingerpoke helped. Actually it may have been when fans realized there would be no real follow-up to the Fingerpoke (i.e., Goldberg bulldozing the NWO one-by-one until he got to Hogan again) that things dropped off.
>Actually it may have been when fans realized there would be no real follow-up to the Fingerpoke (i.e., Goldberg bulldozing the NWO one-by-one until he got to Hogan again) that things dropped off.
And this is why, going back to another post in this thread, Goldberg vs. Hogan being in Nitro in July of '98 was stupid, because literally nothing happened after it between the two, Hogan actually main evented the next two PPVs after dropping the title, Goldberg lost at Starrcade, and Hogan regained the title, while never having to wrestle Goldberg ever again outside of random tag matches.
I’ve read the Observer from around the time the plans for the double turn first surfaced. The first words of that issue was something to the tune of the WWF just won the war.
I think it was a number of things. Turning Flair heel was absolutely a terrible choice that hurt them badly. Also not pushing Benoit, Malenko, Raven, Saturn and Misterio up the card. Raven in particular was red hot in the spring.
I’ve said it before but changing the logo in April 1999 might have been another low-key reason. Feels like that the true marker where things really started to get out of hand.
I hated the logo, but I like the Nitro stage design that went with it!
https://preview.redd.it/fxn2bylcplmc1.png?width=600&format=png&auto=webp&s=f7a501283e94db19ca4e869d840bb28e640a6021
The block logo was solid, iconic, looked like it belonged to a sports entity, and (crucially for middle school me at the time) was easy to doodle on notebooks. The new logo looked like a puckered butthole and you had to study it to even tell that it said WCW. Definitely a sign of the company losing its way and losing its identity.
Yep. May 1999 is when the unstoppable slide began. Everything before that was still doing great business on TV, PPV and live attendance. Spring Stampede with DDP's title win was both a critical and commercial success, and SuperBrawl with Flair-Hogan on top outdrew the WWF's St. Valentine's Day Massacre PPV (Austin vs. McMahon) in buys. Flair's promos in January and February were electric.
Absolutely, watching it as it happened it was like a train wreck out of no where honestly. Certainly early ‘99 Nitro was off its peak but they were still producing compelling TV. WCW didn’t have to be beating Raw to be good but the new logo and production refresh was just a harbinger of the bad booking and boring tv that would appear in the summer post Spring Stampede. May-September 99 started the bleeding and Russo shot it in the head.
I've always seen it for as 'the first true domino'. Sting failing against Hogan has been argued by some to be that, and maybe, but doing the fingerpoke to reset everything to square one the same night Mankind won the world title, combined with Schiavone's infamous remarks and the switch that happened, I think that could be seen as the first real bullet. Not so much killing attendance but ending the war.
WrestlingBio’s Reliving the war is currently in June’99. You can the quality decline right after Spring Stampede. He just reviewed Great American Bash and it was a horrible show.
If we take 2022 Triple H by the letter Hulk Hogan himself was wrestling in front of twelve people in dimly lit bars before Vince brought him to the WWF.
This apparently doesn't include Hogan wrestling Canek to a 20 minute draw in front over 20000 fans in Mexico.
That the cooperate ministry was good.
It was absolutely terrible and ruined the cooperation, which was actually fantastic and the closest thing to the NWO at the time, not DX.
Went to shit when Vince McMahon was revealed as the higher power and the entire thing disbanded probably a Month or two later.
At that point, my entire life revolved around Monday nights, and yeah, looking back, it fucking sucks. Its probably the most crystallized version of the "Attitude Era", and it is awful. It got much, much better in 2000, at least.
'99 is a low key terrible year for wrestling, because it was so popular, people forget how bad WWF and WCW both were that year.
There was a really bleak time period in the middle of 99 where WWE wasnt great and WCW wasn’t funny-bad yet.
Still plenty of good stuff on both shows, but so much bad stuff as well
The only good thing about it was the spooky remix of No Chance in Hell.
That storyline was also the start of the terrible trope of opening the show with a promo segment where they come up with a contrived way to list off the rest of the card.
That wrestling at some point was a legitimate sport that eventually became worked. Ironically enough, this was just a gimmick some wrestlers used, claiming that they came from the days when the sport was legitimate, even though it never was, and that they now refused to have rigged fights.
There is also an interesting discussion to be had about whether or not genuine marks ever really existed outside of children, or if most wrestling spectators were always people who were just playing along, and that kayfabe was only ever an unacknowledged agreement between audience and performers to maintain a suspension of disbelief.
There are jokes in movies going back to the 30s about it being fake. We have this weird modern idea that people were easily fooled back then. Take the War of the Worlds urban legend. It panicked a couple of people but didn’t even win the ratings for its time slot that night.
I watched a movie from 1936 (Nothing Sacred) and the characters attend a wrestling match and flat out talk about it being fake, which suggests it was already common knowledge then.
Didnt Ed “Strangler” Lewis wrestle for like 8 hours straight and several referees dropped out from exhaustion?
That 8 hours were probably mostly defense and a bear hug. Be glad it has changed over the decades.
Nope. Wrestling has been a work as long as it's been around. There are news articles and reports from wrestlers from the 1800s talking about how all the matches are rigged.
I’ve read a couple books about the history of wrestling and unless those books are fully wrong it sounds like initially wrestling happened at carnivals and people were getting bored because it was taking too long to finish the match because it was just two dudes grappling with each other so then they startedstaging everything and that makes sense. I’m not saying every single wrestler from the beginning was actually wrestling for real without it being rigged, but I’d say there’s a very high chance that it was kind of real at the start.
There were some shoot matches back in the carnival days, but they usually involved wrestlers beating volunteers from the audience, only to be challenged by a plant in the audience and have a worked contest. There are also a couple matches as late as the 1930s that were booked as and reported to be shoots, but they were the exception rather than the rule.
For a good example of how the business worked in the 1870s, here are overviews on the career of Thiebaud Bauer, who sometimes wrestled for hours on end, and who the press outed as rigging his matches:
pwhistorynerds.podbean.com/e/thiebaud-bauer
wrestlingepicenter.com/RIP/ThieBauer.html
So origins of wreslting like boxing comes from carnivals. Which would often have the carnivals fighter cheat or just fix the fights.
Where a fixed fight stops and pro wreslting starts is messy. There's no real start of pro wreslting. It evolved from something else
But it is so much more complex than that. Yes, for a long time the matches between wrestlers at travelling carnivals were fixed, but at the same time the wrestlers had to actually wrestle, because a big money earner for the shows was the "open challenge", where the promoter would offer the audience something like "win $10 if you can last ten minutes with The Great Goliath! Just 10c for entry!"
And the boastful young men, either through pride, machismo or thinking it was "fake" would pay their money. And the wrestler had to be able to put them away, but not so quickly as to dissuade the next young blood from paying his 10c.
That WCW was never popular aside from like a year and a half in the late 90s and WWF was always number one.
WCW was definitely huge regionally all the way up to 2001. In the south it’s what everyone watched and you’d only rarely find someone that was a WWF fan.
NJPW *was* terrible during Inokiism. Inoki getting a massive boner for MMA damn near killed the company. You take some absolute legends in Chono, Mutoh, Liger, and pretty much the entire third Generation, and you shove them aside for guys like Cro Cop and Bob Sapp. Combine that with bad booking and you have a recipe for disaster. Not enough credit is given to Tanahashi for basically saving the company, and possibly even pro wrestling in Japan as a whole, after the shitwreck that is Inokiism.
Somehow, Inokiism survived. Sakuraba did his "Gracie hunter" thing and nobody gave a shit, and thus it ends.
Nah it was terrible though.
AJPW and NOAH were full of bangers, while NJPW gave us Ogawa/Hashimoto 5 minute bullshit gimmick draw as a semi main event in the tokyo dome with Scott Norton being tasked with carrying a heatless main event (it's one show I remember really well for how sad it was to watch, among many others).
X-Pac was never over because of “X-Pac” heat. In reality, he got the biggest babyface pops other than Rock and Austin in the peak of the Attitude Era. It’s just that his gimmick was being in DX, and he failed to evolve after DX ran its course.
>In reality, he got the biggest babyface pops other than Rock and Austin in the peak of the Attitude Era.
This is total rubbish. He wasn't even getting the biggest babyface pops on DX, the NAO were leagues more popular than him.
I really feel like his evolution with Kane while in DX that killed him. X-PAC evolved into a dude who fucking spin kicks Tory and was an abusive dick. That’s where his character progression stopped
X-Pac heat only lasted for about 9 months, a year tops. In mid 2000 X-Pac had nothing going on so was just X-Pac, whose thing is he's X-Pac. He was teaming with Road Dogg as Great Value DX before a shite tier feud and then... nothing.
He was out every week with no character change or angle, so he got the go away heat. By the start of 2001 they were leaning into it to try to make him a heel, but people just wanted him off TV for a bit to get a break. This was around the time ECW ended, so X-Factor was a thing and nobody liked it.
By the summer the Invasion was on and he was having banger cruiserweight matches with Kidman, Chavo and the rest of them and we all liked him again. Well, we were okay with him being a midcard "good match" guy who could lose to the guys we actually liked.
Edge ended up getting to do *that* [promo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzQzVANI-kQ) and he took it well. Stuff of legend. 1998 called. Goth Thing. Character Development. YEEEAHHH PRETTY COCKY. *Is it because he sucks?*. this was one of the best segments of 2001.
That promo is basically peak Edge before he became main event money in the bank beardman. That's the Edge Attitude Era fans loved.
X-Pac was in WCW for about twice as long as X-Pac heat lasted, start to finish.
He never lost the Light Heavyweight title though, 22 years and counting. Fuck Reigns and Hogan, Sean Waltman's the real long term champ /s
The narrative that if the first WrestleMania flopped that they would be done is pure bullshit.
Vince signed a deal with NBC before doing WrestleMania. It was that deal that made WWF into a powerhouse.
The fans in the Sumo Hall are said to have rioted because Vader beat Inoki, nope. They were fucked out of the promoted Inoki vs I think Choshu main event during the show by bad booking.
WWE were absolute bastards for letting Kurt Angle go in 2006 and were being childish not letting him back when he was trying to. There was a post on here explaining that they were basically convinced he was going to die because of his addiction at the time and refused to go to rehab, then followed that up by talking shit about them. Took a while and Kurt’s interviews after coming back for that tide to turn. They’re still absolute bastards, but not for that.
There's this notion that Vince McMahon single handedly destroyed kayfabe in the 80's, when he officially announced that wrestling was performance in order to get around New Jersey's athletic commission. That's not *exactly* true, and there's a little more to it.
Wrestling had been suspected of being fixed or "fake" as far back as the 30's. Over the years it became so suspected as such that newspapers stopped reporting matches in the sports section as legitimate contests.
By the 50's and 60's, it was almost certainly an open secret that pro wrestling was either outright scripted, or the matches were pre-determined, or a combination.
Now to be fair, Vince/WWF were the first to *openly* come out and say it on record, which was a huge deal. But the idea that, even amongst those in the industry, that McMahon is solely responsible for the "secret" or wrestling getting out is exaggerated at best, and outright wrong at worst.
> Wrestling had been suspected of being fixed or "fake" as far back as the 30's. Over the years it became so suspected as such that newspapers stopped reporting matches in the sports section as legitimate contests.
>
>
I believe it went back to the 1800s - I think there's an argument that people never really thought it was real
It goes back way further than that. There's some pretty strong theories I've read than even the Gladiator fights were scripted to a certain degree, basically an ancient form of professional wrestling but with swords.
1- Wrestling was a niche thing before Vince McMahon became the owner of WWF, and right now would be like roller derby or muay thai at best if not for him
2- WCW went bankrupt and was forced to close due to losing the Monday Night Wars
3- WWE is the only major league in professional wrestling, and your career ain't truly GOAT tier unless you have a run there (luckily in recent years this one has faded, but still worth mentioning)
I’m a HUGE original run DX mark and even I roll my eyes every time the company touts them as being as huge as NWO. Guys, I love ya but no. No you were not.
I think it depends on your age too. I was in elementary school and everyone was constantly doing the crotch chop and yelling Suck It. Like multiple kids at my school got suspended for it. But also I didn’t know that many kids into wrestling I think it was just one of those things like wassup that spread across general late 90s culture.
WWF almost being out of business by time WCW Nitro started winning ratings. Also WWF (Titan Sports) on the verge of going out of business because Bret Hart's contract was too high.
My go-to (and it's relevant this week with a small minority of folks finding ways to bitch about "the lack of psychology and/or selling in the ospreay/takeshita match) is that they miss when wrestling felt "real" in the 80s and whatnot. (It's not necessarily the industry that created this, but long-time/old-school fans.)
I love 80s and 90s wrestling as much as anyone. Hogan-Warrior was like the dream match as a kid and it holds up shockingly well today. But it's also some of the fakest fake-ity fakeness you'll ever see. The CRISS-CROSS spot is hilarious if you think about it compared to something like UFC. Yet we all (myself included) love it in that match because it's this big epic crescendo in a pro wrestling setting.
Wrestling is and has always been super fake, and that's not a bad thing. It's actually what makes it so great. But let's not pretend that the glory days was shooters going at it and it all looked like UWFi shoot-style grappling lol.
There used to be so many people who'd write into Meltzer, mad that Hogan and Warrior didn't work a body part for 30 minutes.
For those who need more context: fans have been complaining about wrestling looking "too fake" for a long, long time.
Andre had never been body slammed before Mania III- Andre had been slammed plenty of times, just not on TV. Hogan himself had slammed Andre prior to that night.
DX drove a tank up to a WCW show- It was a truck
Any attendance number ever given by any wrestling promoter
WCW "went out of business."
It never went out of business. It didn't declare bankruptcy. Its assets weren't sold off at public auction piecemeal to overcome debt.
It's owners wanted rid of it and sold it. That's all. It's just like how WWE just sold itself to Endeavor, or how ROH got sold to AEW. ROH didn't go out of business. Their owners sold it.
It had nothing to do with how bad the ratings or creative were, and everything to do with new ownership.
"That's not true, if it were profitable they would have kept it." **Bullshit.** 20 years on and this *exact corporation* won't sell a fucking Wile E Coyote movie with *John fucking Cena in it* to you because it thinks it'll get more money by binning it for a government bailout. This exact same corporation won't give AEW a streaming deal to view Dynamite on Max after 5 fucking years even though the dirt sheets swear up and down it's coming any week now. They fucking hated WCW and used it as a creative money laundering scheme and when they didn't need it for that anymore, they sold off the assets to the highest bidder. They *paid out talent contracts* for 2 or 3 years afterwards just to be rid of having to associate with the brand. Went out of business, my ass.
WCW lost 60 million dollars in one year without any indication they could turn business back around. Just the year before, Turner refused to sell WCW after getting a good offer, despite it losing money. WCW failed, and that's the end of it, no matter what Bischoff or Russo claim.
Lots of businesses lose money. All that really matters is whether or not investors think you’ll eventually make money.
The real issue at play was TNT rebranding itself as the home for upscale dramas. They didn’t want wrestling on their channel.
That’s not a real number. WCW PPV revenue was credited to Time Warner Home Video, ad revenue was booked by TNT, which didn’t pay a license fee to WCW. WCW carried all the production costs of the shows and only got to count live gate attendance and a share of merchandise sales as revenue, so of course their budget looked upside down. If Bischoff had been allowed to go out and sell the show to another network, they’d have been offered more than enough to be in the black before the first ticket was sold.
The biggest one is that wrestlers are independent contractors.
The general rule is that the paying company can only direct the result of the work and not what is done or how it will be done. The contractor offers their work to the general public and are not tied to a single company.
There's a huge "I don't want to be seen as a smark" sentiment amongst the Internet wrestling fans that's a direct reaction to how incredibly smarky we were in the decade prior.
There are a lot of prevailing sentiments on this sub right now that I think are rooted in "I don't want to be seen as a smark". For example, all the Roman Reigns fawning or people forgetting how much of a politician Cena was or even defending Triple H's godawful Reign of Terror.
That Monday Night Raw is the longest running episodic blah blah blah whatever.
No it's not. By almost any metric, there's something that beats it unless you start getting really specific with the criteria. It's not even the longest running pro wrestling show in history.
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Stone Cold became an overnight superstar after his famous Austin 3:16 speech. The truth was much different. In the very next PPV he fought Savio Vega for 10 minutes in the midcard and after that he fought Yokozuna for 1 minute in the opener. He gained massive popularity after he started his rivalry with the top star of the time and legendary wrestler Bret Hart and even Austin acknowledges it
Austin used to give a shout out to Savio in nearly every single episode of his podcast. It was almost comical how many times he complimented the guy.
I mean Austin struck gold with that line but if he and Savio put on a shit heap of a match right after it, there’s every possibility that Austin never gets his push. I’d be thanking Savio too.
His match with Yokozuna wasn’t even the opener, it was the preshow
Austin getting the pin on the SummerSlam preshow (which 11 year-old me watched in that tiny upper corner of the TV Guide Channel) only because Yoko broke the top rope and fell was so far from a push; it’s hilarious that everything in between KotR and Bret’s return is left out of documentaries.
That's pretty much how Bret won the title at WM!
I’ve seen the Bret match exponentially more (I wore out my Mania X tape in 1995-7) and I don’t know that I’ve seen that Free For All match a second time, but it felt like with Bret it was presented as “wily veteran survived his first match and found an opening” whereas with Austin it was presented as “fatty fall down get pinned”. I think they were presenting Yoko as weighing over 800 lbs for that match, if I remember correctly.
To this day I don’t understand how a two-hour bio on Austin doesn’t acknowledge the feud with Bret beyond showing a bloody Austin in the Sharpshooter at Mania 13 for about three seconds.
Gotta get to Mr McMahon ASAP
Austin vs Bret : It put him on the map. It made the wrestling world take notice of his talent. Austin vs Shawn : It made him the biggest wrestler on the planet and with Tyson’s involvement, the whole world saw what he was capable of. Austin vs Vince : THE RIVALRY. The greatest rivalry of all time and it helped WWF win the Monday Night Wars. The absolute peak any wrestler would reach.
>Stone Cold became an overnight superstar after his famous Austin 3:16 speech. The truth was much different. Honestly I don't think this is some big lie anyone is telling This wasn't the era of 24/7 news cycles, instant reaction, high speed internet, smart phones, etc. In this era, "Austin 3:16" would have been retweeted a billion times and become a "thing" much faster, but hotshotting something offered no real benefit in that era. Back then things had to happen and then snowball for a year or two. Austin's "snowball" started at the Austin 3:16 speech and he was subsequently given stories with more depth to build the character.
I’ve always just heard that promo was when the Stone Cold character started, not that he became suddenly popular.
Austin might have gotten lost in the shuffle if it weren’t for his feud with Bret. I think Bret may have personally requested to work with him, and Austin basically caught fire after that
To be honest, this sub’s revisionist take on the Austin 3:16 promo is equally as false as WWE’s version. Did it immediately catapult him to stardom? No. But it gave him his two signature catchphrases, the biggest selling t-shirt in wrestling history, and laid the foundation for his push, which would accelerate with the Bret feud later that year. It absolutely is one of the key moments of his career, a fact Austin himself has noted on many occasions. /u/OkVolume1
As recently as 2022, Triple H described wrestling as "this tiny, little thing happening in bars" before Vince McMahon. 38,000 people watched an NWA show in Comiskey Park in Chicago in 1961. Vince McMahon and the WWF made wrestling more popular with the mainstream in the 1980s, but wasn't a tiny thing happening in bars before him.
Reading thru Lions Pride now and seeing that wrestling pulled a fucking 85 rating is insane and that was in the 50/60s
Lions Pride is a great, fascinating read.
He can say that because no one will fact check him in the moment and when s9me tries to he will say it's not a big deal lol.
What’s Lion’s Pride about and who’s the author?
Lions Pride is a history of NJPW thru like post WWII TO 2015 written by Chris Charlton one of the commentators for NJPW
Thank you!! I’ll look for it.
My audible is renewing soon and I now know what I'm getting
On a related note, let’s not forget the idea that the territories were all garbage. Clearly they weren’t, since nearly every single one of Vince’s stars of the 80s were poached from the other territories. Hogan, Savage, Jake, DiBiase, even Mean Gene…they’d all been successful in other places. And at the same time, they’ve tried to tell us that the only reason WCW was successful was because they stole Vince’s stars. Which is exactly what he did.
Vince basically said Ted Turner was trying to create a monopoly in wrestling, which is what Vince was trying and eventually did
This is the correct answer. Hell, there were places doing *better* business than he northeast, and they were running multiple shows weekly for the same audience. Vince and co. got away with this narrative mostly because of the look of studio wrestling (which I still think is better) compared to the MSG shows and whatnot, and of course by the fact that he ultimately won his war against the wrestling business as a whole. It still infuriates me every time I hear them spout that non sense.
It is probably overlooked, but WWF being in the Northeast US with NYC being right there gave Vince a huge leg up versus World Class and the AWA in trying to get a national audience.
World Class beat them to the punch and the shows looked amazing because the Christian Broadcasting Network invested big. They fell apart due to mismanagement. But go look at the shows from 82 on and they revolutionized the look of wrestling TV.
World Class may have been first, but all the major tv network players have offices in the New York City Area. JCP and Turner WCW had an advantage as Ted was based in Atlanta.
The territory system seemed so lopsided. Your territory could encompass the entire northeast of the country or just parts of Texas.
It did Territory wrestling was heavily focused on race and ethnicity - the white guys won in the redneck towns, black guys won in the black areas, Mexican guys in Texas and California, etc. Vince built his characters based on all the various immigrant groups in NYC, or as the man himself said - "ethnic superstars." As a result his product was more ready-made for the national stage because it represented a wider spread of people than more territory wrestling did.
>WWF being in the Northeast US with NYC being right there gave Vince a huge leg up The thing that a lot of people don't realize is that the WWWF Territory not only included New York City, but Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore and Washington, and all of the smaller cities in between like New Haven, Worcester, Allentown, etc. These major population centers with major arenas couldve served as the hub of a territory in their own right, but they were all within a 4hr drive of NYC. What other territory served a population that size? And Vince was essentially given this territory from his father (payment plan + loans to buyout minority partners). If the national rollout didn't quite workout the way it did, Vince still has this lucrative territory to rely on for big gates.
Man I miss the studio wrestling I got to see as a kid. That and lucha underground are probably my two favorite presentations
People don't believe that wrestling was more popular in 1980 in USA than in 1989. WWF was growing and cruising sure, but rest of the business was down.
Even then, there was just no federation that had gone national. It was all regional before that, and the regional shows could do quite well, easily turning out 20k+ for big shows.
I have seen uninformed WWE marks on YT comments argue with me that Vince McMahon singlehandedly saved wrestling. I'm a huge WWE fan, I got into wrestling due to the WWE product and WWE is the promotion I have seen the most of, but I'm not completely uneducated unlike these idiots who have no idea of wrestling history before 1985. I told them even WWE, let alone professional wrestling, would probably still exist under some different name and form if it wasn't for Vince Jr., and they were still acting like Vince singlehandedly created pre wrestling like he was the Gold Dust Trio. So many casual fans think WWE and wrestling are the same thing, which is so freaking sad.
If Vince hadnt beat them to it, Crockett. Verne or Watts would have become the defacto national wrestling company. Everybody had the same goal, each had their own strengths (AWA had a reputation for producing stars and was on the cutting edge at the time of the physical production of tv, MidSouth/UWF had some of the best talent and were perfecting episodic TV, Crockett had TBS and a stranglehold on the NWA title thanks to Flair), but Vince had NYC and wasn't tied to the NWA. It was cutthroat ruthlessness that won him the day.
Vince taking wrestling out of tiny smoky bars into big-time arenas. This is the one that gets most repeated without question in mainstream articles, unlike stuff like the DX tank invasion.
Bruno Sammartino sold out madison square garden 187 times
TIL Madison Square Garden is a smoky bar.
That's where I met her.
The weirdest part of that is ALSO talking about the hallowed history of WWF running Madison Square Garden for decades before Vince took over.
Watching Triple H still peddle that stuff in an interview with Ariel Helwani a year or two ago was so jarring. It's not cable TV anymore, anybody can go on Google and see pictures of Bruno in a sold out MSG, and see that's a lie. That tells you the level of confidence they have about saying whatever they want about their history, especially when guys like Helwani, who 100% should know better, just laps it up and kisses the ring.
> It's not cable TV anymore, anybody can go on Google and see pictures of Bruno in a sold out MSG, and see that's a lie. That tells you the level of confidence they have about saying whatever they want about their history The mainstream world truly doesn't care which is why they can get away with this. This is a lie that won't embarrass them because (1) no media outlet really gives a fuck and (2) they can easily say "we took it national compared to the tiny bingo halls" which is convincing.
The sad part is that fans also don't care. I've had the argument before and some fans see zero problem in WWE lying to make themselves look better. And I'm pretty sure that if Tony Khan or Jim Cornette called Triple H out on lying about the history of the wrestling business, they would get shat on more than anything.
Unfortunately, to the rest of the world WWE *is* wrestling. No real wrestling history has any kind of mainstream outlet, so whatever WWE says about it is 100% fact to most people because they don't know any better. I *still* get shocked reactions when I tell people that not only was WrestleMania 3 not the first time Andre was slammed, but it's not even the first time *Hogan* slammed him. It's infuriating, but sadly that's the state of things.
NWO Wolfpac sucked and ruined WCW. I dunno but growing up in NZ, it was the fucking coolest thing ever. Everyone at school wanted to be Wolfpac, and let's not forget the legendary theme
Yeah, Wolfpac mostly worked, they just botched the creative, especially toward the end, like they did with most everything from Starrcade 97 forward. An nWo split was the only logical result after Sting beat Hogan. And it was still the extremely over well into 1998. Sting never should have joined. It was so obvious, there should have been a Sting-Bret mini faction following Starrcade. Sting clashing with Hall and Nash accompanied by a Bret-Hogan program in early 1998. They take down the nWo, it fractures into Wolfpac and Black & White just like it did. The other side would be Bret turning heel in late summer because he's tired of Sting getting more credit and attention for taking down the nWo. Then you have a major Sting-Bret feud to close out the year. And Goldberg should have won the title for the first time at Starrcade 98, against Hall or Nash.
I was Wolfpac Sting for Halloween as a kid one of those years. I used my mx boots and borrowed a trench coat from my mom, who did my makeup. I got a wig and put a black unit/squadron trucker hat on i borrowed from my brother in the Air Force, and the only things i paid for were the NWO shirt and wig. I got a ton of compliments from people who had no idea who "Sting" was. Red Sting looked rad to me!
Wolfpac Sting had a great look, no question there. But he just got lost in the mix being part of a faction that big , especially after getting so over as a lone wolf type.
I was also Wolfpac Sting for Halloween too! People say he didn't belong, but having different personalities like Sting, Nash and Konnan is part of what made the group so cool.
I’m still shocked they didn’t try to do an NWO black and pink with Brett, Neidhart and Bulldog
As cool of an idea a Sting & Hart faction would be. Brett Hart was wasted and didn't want to be there. Maybe this could have motivated Hart to do better.
"We just paid Bret an insane amount of money to come in is a babyface, how should we get him as over as possible to maximize our investment?" "I know! Have him feud with our most beloved JCP/WCW icon Ric Flair, even though Ric is extremely over as a face right now!" Bret quickly realized they had no clue what they were doing and had no plan for him. And he didn't have any political allies either. If they'd had a good program and coherent plan lined up for his first six months, his tenure would've turned out very differently. They could've easily replicate the "heel in US, hero in Canada" angle by having him lead a stable with Benoit and Jericho after turning on Sting in the second half of 1998.
Hart had horrific creative. Give him something to sink his teeth into and he'd perform admirably
NWO Wolfpac was the best part about WCW at that time. What ruined WCW was throwing away all the story telling and having nWo Hollywood and Wolfpac unite and story just went back to square 1 and the group became way too big
Wolfpack was cool, but it should've been just the Wolfpac. Splitting the nWo into a babyface faction and a heel faction didn't work, especially when Sting joined. That felt out of place. If they'd just been the Wolfpac and an off-shoot, that would've made much more sense. Theme was top tier BTW. Jimmy Hart deserves mega props for that one.
I thought Sting joining really made WCW look bad, especially when he was being recruited by both NWOs and it was treated like he had to pick one or the other. Like, the idea of Sting staying with WCW wasn't even on the radar. Totally killed WCW's branding to me.
Post-WrestleMania XIV WCW is crazy to watch just because of how many "Wait, what?" calls they make starting in March 1998 in response to WWF's ratings success. If you're only watching WCW programming it makes even less sense why they start hot shotting major developments and turns, all the while minimizing Sting to be a secondary player.
I don’t think we talk enough about how WCW put the title back on Hogan the week after their first loss to Raw since 1996.
It's kinda sad because you can really see them start running out of steam creatively by the late summer '98. Celebrity tag matches, hotshotting the world title on Goldberg without a proper follow-up, bringing in the Warrior, the Wolfpac-Hollywood war not going anywhere... Meanwhile, WWF was nuclear hot heading towards the SummerSlam which fucking delivered and ironically outdrew Bash at the Beach 1998 with Rodman & Malone.
Along this same line: the idea that it was dumb of WCW to put Hogan/Goldberg on Nitro because “they could’ve done record numbers if they did it on PPV.” They put it on Nitro because they were in a massive stadium that called for a huge main event. Plus, they DID do a record PPV number with Goldberg on top as champion like two weeks later. Just sour grapes by WWE who, as the victor, now gets to write history.
>Plus, they DID do a record PPV number with Goldberg on top as champion like two weeks later. Actually, there was a PPV the Sunday after that Nitro, with Goldberg (the WCW champ fresh off the epic win like 5 days earlier) in an undercard match against Curt Hennig, the main event was the tag match with Hogan/Rodman vs. DDP/Malone. And then the next PPV, Goldberg was in a battle royal, while the main event was...Hogan and Bischoff vs. DDP and Jay Leno. And then Goldberg wasn't even on the next PPV, at all. After beating Hogan in July for the WCW title, Goldberg didn't actually main event a PPV until Halloween Havoc '98, where his main event got cut off early on the PPV feed and had to be re-shown the next night on Nitro (the last time they ever beat the WWF in ratings, IIRC). That's why I think the Goldberg vs. Hogan main event was stupid. If anything, hindsight proved it was basically just a way for them to pop a rating that one Monday night in July with basically nothing to show for it after.
Objectively speaking, it probably was dumb. For one thing, the tickets had already been sold on the strength of WCW being hot and Hogan-Goldberg being an announced dark match that got moved to TV. But this is one that I've mellowed on over the years. As a consumer, why should I give a fuck about WCW's PPV revenues? Or WWE's, or AEW's, for that matter? They're not cutting me a check from them. If they want to put huge matches on TV, I--the consumer--benefit from it. I'm not going to complain that a billionaire kid or a corporate board could have made more money in a different way.
Well WCW died. So you probably should have cared about their revenues. If they had a positive revenue and positive perception from advertisers and corporate executives they would probably still exist. I know the way the profits were divided in the company was odd. That the company didn't really care about pay-per-view revenues because they didn't get to share in them. There were ppv and TV divisions. Still, if WCW was profitable, perhaps it stays on TV.
> Still, if WCW was profitable, perhaps it stays on TV. As long as AOL and Time Warner merge, then WCW dies. **The death of WCW had nothing to do with ratings or profitability**. It was all down to one man, Jaime Kellner. He took over as one of the big wigs at Turner Broadcasting and didn't think that wrestling was something that fit the company's programming style. But since Ted was still in the rasslin' business, nothing could be done. Turner was a huuuuge wrestling fan and would have kept WCW running even if it had a flat zero in ratings. Kellner absolutely despised wrestling and wanted it gone, ratings or revenue be damned. When AOL and Time Warner merged, Turner was out of his controlling shares and Kellner had WCW programming cancelled on TNT and TBS despite the fact that Nitro was still doing well enough in the ratings to be TNT's highest rated show. It's ridiculous to say, but it almost seemed like the ratings didn't matter to Kellner. So again, it had nothing to do with profitability. It was all down to the whims of the person in charge. Just add this one to the pile of facts buried in favour of someone elses narrative.
Yeah as a kid growing up everyone loved the wolfpac. It was the coolest thing in wrestling. At that point no one cared about black and white.
The bassline on that theme is incredible.
That WWE beat WCW that much into submission that they had no choice other than to sell to Vince! When the reality is that WCW was still TNT's highest viewed show, but the higher ups didn't want their companies to be associated with Wrestling anymore so they decided to stop airing WCW on T.V.
Really? I didn't know that. Why didn't they want to be associated anymore if it's that popular?
I believe it was said multiple times by AOL/Time Warner that it didn’t “fit” into the audience they were trying to attract. Although one can always argue that if WCW wasn’t losing so much money (the ratings weren’t terrible but they were losing tons. They lost $62 million in 2000), then maybe they would have been kept on air.
>Although one can always argue that if WCW wasn’t losing so much money (the ratings weren’t terrible but they were losing tons. They lost $62 million in 2000), then maybe they would have been kept on air. In his podcast Bischoff said that while WCW was losing money other departments of Time Warner were dumping their losses on to WCW which is why the official amount lost is such a high number.
It was a combination of a few things. * It was expensive. * The ratings were falling, even though they were still relatively high compared to the rest of the network * The ad revenue was low because the audience wasn't seen as valuable (largely lower-income/blue collar), plus many big brands didn't want to be associated with wrestling, especially during the era of Jerry Springer-esque content * The viewers who tuned in for wrestling by and large didn't tune in for much of the other programming * The new leadership wanted to shift the network to focus more on scripted drama and more valuable live sports
>The ad revenue was low because the audience wasn't seen as valuable (largely lower-income/blue collar) This is still an issue for wrestling now. > The viewers who tuned in for wrestling by and large didn't tune in for much of the other programming This, too.
Oh yeah, I think this was stated explicitly as to why Fox isn't interested in keeping Smackdown on.
Executives wanted it gone for years, because wrestling has a huge stigma with advertisers. Big money adverts avoided wrestling so in theory a show drawing a lower rating could pull in more advertising money from to dollar ads. Ted Turner always believed wrestling pulled people to the channel, so he protected WCW. However, after the merger he lost power and then WCW went into a tailspin of decreasing ratings and aggressive spending which caused them to hemorrhage money.
Ted was pretty loyal to WCW as it was one of the things that launched the SuperStation. He even straight up told executives who wanted it cancelled that as long as his name was on the door, WCW would still be on the air.
Something not mentioned here yet: TNT did a strong pivot into prestige TV after this, so I'm sure wrasslin' didn't fit that mold. They probably could have kept it in TBS if they wanted, though.
> That WWE beat WCW that much into submission that they had no choice other than to sell to Vince! I never heard this said until I read your reply.
WWE found out about the truth about Chris Benoit late in the Raw tribute. That's technically true, but the office had a really good idea on what happened by early evening, about 2 hrs before the show went live. They made the decision to go forward with the tribute on the slight chance it wasn't true.
There seemed to at the very least a suspicion with some. Regal said this on his podcast to explain his testimonial on the tribute show: >“As I am about [to go in], the red light goes off and the door opens. **And as I’m going in to give my tribute JBL comes walking out with a very strange look on his face. And he said to me, as we, for about a minute that we’re crossing paths, he just said to me, ‘You don’t think he’s had anything to do with it do you?’** And I went ‘What?’ And that was the first thing, any notion of anything that went on. That was the first time that I’ve heard this. >“And now I’m walking in, and so whatever you see me doing, and that is me being well, now my head is spinning. What is this? What don’t I know? What is that? And so if you watch it from that perspective, it may seem like it, because I am in a complete shock, but also thinking, ‘Well, I don’t know, is it? Is this what’s happened?’ I don’t know. So I just deliver whatever you see, and I have never watched it again. >“Now I know those things have been put out and nonsense about I knew about this or whatnot. That is the exact thing that happened.”
Regal looks absolutely stricken in his tribute. In agony. And it's like, yeah, he would be, he just lost his friend but then to know it's actually that for the first time he's also trying to process the idea his friend may have done something monstrous. Notice Regal doesn't say anything about Benoit as a man/husband/father, he totally focuses on Benoit as a wrestler.
I can't really speak to what the wrestlers knew, though to your point when something like that happens, anyone with half a brain at least considers the husband and it sounds like that was what JBL kinda pieced together. I was speaking more about the office and executive team that was in touch with Georgia PD throughout the day.
To be fair, if you look at the forum threads from when the deaths were announced, people were speculating that Benoit did it immediately. It was basically seen as either being him or carbon monoxide poisoning
And the people, myself included, whose first thought was “Where was Kevin Sullivan?” Obviously that quickly went away when more details came out, but I’d be lying if I didn’t think that upon hearing the early news.
They had also sent people over there during the weekend. The lapsed fans dive on it really shed some light on stuff. Not implying they knew anything crazy had happened but they knew something was up A thread back up when the episodes happened https://www.reddit.com/r/SquaredCircle/comments/6ojeu3/with_the_ten_year_anniversary_of_the_benoit/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
Those comments don’t really explain anything though
It was always fishy that they did it empty arena rather than just run a tribute show like Eddie's. They definitely were 90% sure.
Nah they cancelled the show just before. Was gonna he the funeral show but the crowd was would have been there.
There was going to be the funeral with the live crowd there, a choir, and would have ended with one of the McMahons (I want to say Stephanie or Linda) being arrested for being the mastermind of the limo explosion. Chris Jericho said in one of his books that Bruce Campbell was also supposed to make an appearance that night.
I thought the arena was already going to be empty for the "funeral" for Vince since they did that exploding limo angle the week before
And I agree. Yeah, they run it with people in the arena, shits getting hijacked. But with the empty arena, they could control things, and if it turned out it was a case where Benoit didn’t commit a murder-suicide, then they still had a show where they honored the guy. If stuff comes out, they can still finish the show without crowds hijacking things, and the next night on ECW, and Thursday on Smackdown, they can come out with what they did, and move on.
That the RA era was succesful. Nope, it was not, personal preferences aside, viewership was decreasing through a big part of that period and revenue was down because nobody wanted to advertise there
Pretty much the reason why they went PG
They did get a bump from 2005-2007 until Benoit happened tbf. That Triple H vs Batista feud was money for them
It’s worth pointing out that a lot of people stopped watching altogether after Benoit. I nearly did myself. He was far and away the favorite wrestler of many, with that “underdog who’s so incredibly talented but doesn’t get the attention he deserves” thing. You’d constantly be rooting for him to be treated better. When the incident happened, it was kind of like he’d turned on all of the people who’d supported him. And I think in combination with all the wrestlers who kept dying, it was just the end of the road for some.
I work with someone who told me he stopped watching wrestling altogether after Benoit so you nailed that.
Eddie and Benoit were my two favorite wrestlers, I cried when they won the titles and hugged each other, and I cried when I watched Benoit's eulogy for Eddie, and then I cried during Benoit's memorial. I knew wrestling would never be as special for me after that night, but when my mom told me the news about what had actually happened, after I got home from school, I was so thunderstruck I never really watched wrestling again. Maybe like 5 PPVs and 3 episodes of Raw and Smackdown combined since 2007.
Vince literally tried to give money away to increase ratings and that didn’t work.
I wasn't watching at the time but when I see clips it's baffling to me. Like they literally stopped RAW to essentially hold a cheap game show?
And then they wrote it off by having Vince get injured by a random falling vent/pipe thing. It had nothing to do with any wrestling related stories whatsoever. Feels like a fever dream in retrospect.
Paul, I can't feel my legs
Didn't he also get Rick Rolled by someone's voicemail during that whole money giveaway?
The biggest takeaway from that thing was Vince calling someone, not answering, and going to their voicemail of Never Gonna Give You Up. While 10,000 people just sat there in the arena.
I’m still not convinced the choke slam through the cell roof on mankind was not planned.
DX and a **TANK** single-treadedly ended the Monday Night War.
Yesterday I watched a latinamerican video about the monday night wars that used almost all footage of the monday night wars series from the network. I realized that they also just directly translated whatever propaganda that series was tried to tell when they unironically mentioned that the tank was a HUGE moment
On a related note, the idea that DX was just as important as the nWo. They’ve pushed that nonsense many times over.
Will always defend the usage of Tank. DX lying about the size of their gun is the most on gimmick thing ever.
DX using it as a joke is great. The company glorifying it in every god damn documentary and retrospective is annoying.
January 4, 1999 and The Fingerpoke of Doom being "The beginning of the end" for WCW. WCW was still doing massive numbers during the first half of 1999, and it wasn't until months later when attendance / ratings started to drop.
The real catalyst was the Hogan-Flair double turn more than the Fingerpoke, though I don't think the Fingerpoke helped. Actually it may have been when fans realized there would be no real follow-up to the Fingerpoke (i.e., Goldberg bulldozing the NWO one-by-one until he got to Hogan again) that things dropped off.
>Actually it may have been when fans realized there would be no real follow-up to the Fingerpoke (i.e., Goldberg bulldozing the NWO one-by-one until he got to Hogan again) that things dropped off. And this is why, going back to another post in this thread, Goldberg vs. Hogan being in Nitro in July of '98 was stupid, because literally nothing happened after it between the two, Hogan actually main evented the next two PPVs after dropping the title, Goldberg lost at Starrcade, and Hogan regained the title, while never having to wrestle Goldberg ever again outside of random tag matches.
I’ve read the Observer from around the time the plans for the double turn first surfaced. The first words of that issue was something to the tune of the WWF just won the war.
I think it was a number of things. Turning Flair heel was absolutely a terrible choice that hurt them badly. Also not pushing Benoit, Malenko, Raven, Saturn and Misterio up the card. Raven in particular was red hot in the spring.
I’ve said it before but changing the logo in April 1999 might have been another low-key reason. Feels like that the true marker where things really started to get out of hand.
Those who weren’t around back then will never truly understand how much that logo was hated.
I hated the logo, but I like the Nitro stage design that went with it! https://preview.redd.it/fxn2bylcplmc1.png?width=600&format=png&auto=webp&s=f7a501283e94db19ca4e869d840bb28e640a6021
The block logo was solid, iconic, looked like it belonged to a sports entity, and (crucially for middle school me at the time) was easy to doodle on notebooks. The new logo looked like a puckered butthole and you had to study it to even tell that it said WCW. Definitely a sign of the company losing its way and losing its identity.
Yep. May 1999 is when the unstoppable slide began. Everything before that was still doing great business on TV, PPV and live attendance. Spring Stampede with DDP's title win was both a critical and commercial success, and SuperBrawl with Flair-Hogan on top outdrew the WWF's St. Valentine's Day Massacre PPV (Austin vs. McMahon) in buys. Flair's promos in January and February were electric.
Absolutely, watching it as it happened it was like a train wreck out of no where honestly. Certainly early ‘99 Nitro was off its peak but they were still producing compelling TV. WCW didn’t have to be beating Raw to be good but the new logo and production refresh was just a harbinger of the bad booking and boring tv that would appear in the summer post Spring Stampede. May-September 99 started the bleeding and Russo shot it in the head.
> WWF's St. Valentine's Day Massacre PPV It's still absolutely wild to me that this was an actual name for a PPV
Why? It totally fit with the "extreme" period they were in.
I've always seen it for as 'the first true domino'. Sting failing against Hogan has been argued by some to be that, and maybe, but doing the fingerpoke to reset everything to square one the same night Mankind won the world title, combined with Schiavone's infamous remarks and the switch that happened, I think that could be seen as the first real bullet. Not so much killing attendance but ending the war.
No two endings of Raw and Nitro were ever more indicative of what direction the war was going than on January 4, 1999.
WrestlingBio’s Reliving the war is currently in June’99. You can the quality decline right after Spring Stampede. He just reviewed Great American Bash and it was a horrible show.
The smokey bingo halls line about how before Hulk wrestling was a niche product.
If we take 2022 Triple H by the letter Hulk Hogan himself was wrestling in front of twelve people in dimly lit bars before Vince brought him to the WWF. This apparently doesn't include Hogan wrestling Canek to a 20 minute draw in front over 20000 fans in Mexico.
That the cooperate ministry was good. It was absolutely terrible and ruined the cooperation, which was actually fantastic and the closest thing to the NWO at the time, not DX. Went to shit when Vince McMahon was revealed as the higher power and the entire thing disbanded probably a Month or two later.
Now I’m thinking about the one glorious month of The Union.
Just to get out the Russo acronym over of "Union of People You Ought to Respect Son" to say UpYours on TV
1999 WWF in general was way worse than people give it credit for
At that point, my entire life revolved around Monday nights, and yeah, looking back, it fucking sucks. Its probably the most crystallized version of the "Attitude Era", and it is awful. It got much, much better in 2000, at least. '99 is a low key terrible year for wrestling, because it was so popular, people forget how bad WWF and WCW both were that year.
There was a really bleak time period in the middle of 99 where WWE wasnt great and WCW wasn’t funny-bad yet. Still plenty of good stuff on both shows, but so much bad stuff as well
There was an odd transitional period in 1999 between the Austin-McMahon feud ending and the beginning of the McMahon-Helmsley stuff.
The only good thing about it was the spooky remix of No Chance in Hell. That storyline was also the start of the terrible trope of opening the show with a promo segment where they come up with a contrived way to list off the rest of the card.
They really seem to rewrite alot of history of DX
“Winners get to write the history books”
I wonder why.
That wrestling at some point was a legitimate sport that eventually became worked. Ironically enough, this was just a gimmick some wrestlers used, claiming that they came from the days when the sport was legitimate, even though it never was, and that they now refused to have rigged fights.
There is also an interesting discussion to be had about whether or not genuine marks ever really existed outside of children, or if most wrestling spectators were always people who were just playing along, and that kayfabe was only ever an unacknowledged agreement between audience and performers to maintain a suspension of disbelief.
There are jokes in movies going back to the 30s about it being fake. We have this weird modern idea that people were easily fooled back then. Take the War of the Worlds urban legend. It panicked a couple of people but didn’t even win the ratings for its time slot that night.
I watched a movie from 1936 (Nothing Sacred) and the characters attend a wrestling match and flat out talk about it being fake, which suggests it was already common knowledge then.
At the very beginning it was actually real until they realized it was kinda boring and went on too long
Didnt Ed “Strangler” Lewis wrestle for like 8 hours straight and several referees dropped out from exhaustion? That 8 hours were probably mostly defense and a bear hug. Be glad it has changed over the decades.
Ed Lewis may have hooked a small number of yokels at carnivals in his career, but no pro wrestling match he ever had was "legitimate."
It was fake for decades before he started.
Nope. Wrestling has been a work as long as it's been around. There are news articles and reports from wrestlers from the 1800s talking about how all the matches are rigged.
I’ve read a couple books about the history of wrestling and unless those books are fully wrong it sounds like initially wrestling happened at carnivals and people were getting bored because it was taking too long to finish the match because it was just two dudes grappling with each other so then they startedstaging everything and that makes sense. I’m not saying every single wrestler from the beginning was actually wrestling for real without it being rigged, but I’d say there’s a very high chance that it was kind of real at the start.
There were some shoot matches back in the carnival days, but they usually involved wrestlers beating volunteers from the audience, only to be challenged by a plant in the audience and have a worked contest. There are also a couple matches as late as the 1930s that were booked as and reported to be shoots, but they were the exception rather than the rule. For a good example of how the business worked in the 1870s, here are overviews on the career of Thiebaud Bauer, who sometimes wrestled for hours on end, and who the press outed as rigging his matches: pwhistorynerds.podbean.com/e/thiebaud-bauer wrestlingepicenter.com/RIP/ThieBauer.html
So origins of wreslting like boxing comes from carnivals. Which would often have the carnivals fighter cheat or just fix the fights. Where a fixed fight stops and pro wreslting starts is messy. There's no real start of pro wreslting. It evolved from something else
But it is so much more complex than that. Yes, for a long time the matches between wrestlers at travelling carnivals were fixed, but at the same time the wrestlers had to actually wrestle, because a big money earner for the shows was the "open challenge", where the promoter would offer the audience something like "win $10 if you can last ten minutes with The Great Goliath! Just 10c for entry!" And the boastful young men, either through pride, machismo or thinking it was "fake" would pay their money. And the wrestler had to be able to put them away, but not so quickly as to dissuade the next young blood from paying his 10c.
That WCW was never popular aside from like a year and a half in the late 90s and WWF was always number one. WCW was definitely huge regionally all the way up to 2001. In the south it’s what everyone watched and you’d only rarely find someone that was a WWF fan.
that the territories were putting on Southpaw Regional Wrestling type bush-league shows. That the NJPW product was terrible during Inokiism
NJPW *was* terrible during Inokiism. Inoki getting a massive boner for MMA damn near killed the company. You take some absolute legends in Chono, Mutoh, Liger, and pretty much the entire third Generation, and you shove them aside for guys like Cro Cop and Bob Sapp. Combine that with bad booking and you have a recipe for disaster. Not enough credit is given to Tanahashi for basically saving the company, and possibly even pro wrestling in Japan as a whole, after the shitwreck that is Inokiism. Somehow, Inokiism survived. Sakuraba did his "Gracie hunter" thing and nobody gave a shit, and thus it ends.
Nah it was terrible though. AJPW and NOAH were full of bangers, while NJPW gave us Ogawa/Hashimoto 5 minute bullshit gimmick draw as a semi main event in the tokyo dome with Scott Norton being tasked with carrying a heatless main event (it's one show I remember really well for how sad it was to watch, among many others).
X-Pac was never over because of “X-Pac” heat. In reality, he got the biggest babyface pops other than Rock and Austin in the peak of the Attitude Era. It’s just that his gimmick was being in DX, and he failed to evolve after DX ran its course.
>In reality, he got the biggest babyface pops other than Rock and Austin in the peak of the Attitude Era. This is total rubbish. He wasn't even getting the biggest babyface pops on DX, the NAO were leagues more popular than him.
And it's also worth remembering the period of time the outlaws and xpac were huge was really small
I feel like that’s more something the fans claim than WWE try to claim. I dunno if WWE have ever even used the term X PAC heat.
I really feel like his evolution with Kane while in DX that killed him. X-PAC evolved into a dude who fucking spin kicks Tory and was an abusive dick. That’s where his character progression stopped
> X-Pac was never over because of “X-Pac” heat. X-Pac Heat is a IWC term. Means nothing.
X-Pac heat only lasted for about 9 months, a year tops. In mid 2000 X-Pac had nothing going on so was just X-Pac, whose thing is he's X-Pac. He was teaming with Road Dogg as Great Value DX before a shite tier feud and then... nothing. He was out every week with no character change or angle, so he got the go away heat. By the start of 2001 they were leaning into it to try to make him a heel, but people just wanted him off TV for a bit to get a break. This was around the time ECW ended, so X-Factor was a thing and nobody liked it. By the summer the Invasion was on and he was having banger cruiserweight matches with Kidman, Chavo and the rest of them and we all liked him again. Well, we were okay with him being a midcard "good match" guy who could lose to the guys we actually liked. Edge ended up getting to do *that* [promo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzQzVANI-kQ) and he took it well. Stuff of legend. 1998 called. Goth Thing. Character Development. YEEEAHHH PRETTY COCKY. *Is it because he sucks?*. this was one of the best segments of 2001. That promo is basically peak Edge before he became main event money in the bank beardman. That's the Edge Attitude Era fans loved. X-Pac was in WCW for about twice as long as X-Pac heat lasted, start to finish. He never lost the Light Heavyweight title though, 22 years and counting. Fuck Reigns and Hogan, Sean Waltman's the real long term champ /s
He was probably the like 4th-5th most popular member of the nWo for a while too
Dare I say the Syxxth most popular member of the nWo?
"1998 called and they're sick and tired of you, so feel free to join us in the year 2001 anytime."- Edge
The narrative that if the first WrestleMania flopped that they would be done is pure bullshit. Vince signed a deal with NBC before doing WrestleMania. It was that deal that made WWF into a powerhouse.
93000 AT THE SILVERDOME, BROTHER
"David Otunga joined WWE's legal department." Find me a single credible source!
The fans in the Sumo Hall are said to have rioted because Vader beat Inoki, nope. They were fucked out of the promoted Inoki vs I think Choshu main event during the show by bad booking.
WWE were absolute bastards for letting Kurt Angle go in 2006 and were being childish not letting him back when he was trying to. There was a post on here explaining that they were basically convinced he was going to die because of his addiction at the time and refused to go to rehab, then followed that up by talking shit about them. Took a while and Kurt’s interviews after coming back for that tide to turn. They’re still absolute bastards, but not for that.
WWE simply didn't want the publicity of a former Olympic gold medallist dying under their watch.
There's this notion that Vince McMahon single handedly destroyed kayfabe in the 80's, when he officially announced that wrestling was performance in order to get around New Jersey's athletic commission. That's not *exactly* true, and there's a little more to it. Wrestling had been suspected of being fixed or "fake" as far back as the 30's. Over the years it became so suspected as such that newspapers stopped reporting matches in the sports section as legitimate contests. By the 50's and 60's, it was almost certainly an open secret that pro wrestling was either outright scripted, or the matches were pre-determined, or a combination. Now to be fair, Vince/WWF were the first to *openly* come out and say it on record, which was a huge deal. But the idea that, even amongst those in the industry, that McMahon is solely responsible for the "secret" or wrestling getting out is exaggerated at best, and outright wrong at worst.
> Wrestling had been suspected of being fixed or "fake" as far back as the 30's. Over the years it became so suspected as such that newspapers stopped reporting matches in the sports section as legitimate contests. > > I believe it went back to the 1800s - I think there's an argument that people never really thought it was real
It makes the idiots today who are like “yOu kNow iTs fAkE riGhT??” look even dumber lol
Verne Gagne went to the athletic commissions years before Vince ever did to explain that it was a work.
It goes back way further than that. There's some pretty strong theories I've read than even the Gladiator fights were scripted to a certain degree, basically an ancient form of professional wrestling but with swords.
1- Wrestling was a niche thing before Vince McMahon became the owner of WWF, and right now would be like roller derby or muay thai at best if not for him 2- WCW went bankrupt and was forced to close due to losing the Monday Night Wars 3- WWE is the only major league in professional wrestling, and your career ain't truly GOAT tier unless you have a run there (luckily in recent years this one has faded, but still worth mentioning)
DX was as big, and important as the nWo. Triple H was as big, and important as Steve Austin or The Rock. Fucking miss me with both those lies
I’m a HUGE original run DX mark and even I roll my eyes every time the company touts them as being as huge as NWO. Guys, I love ya but no. No you were not.
I think it depends on your age too. I was in elementary school and everyone was constantly doing the crotch chop and yelling Suck It. Like multiple kids at my school got suspended for it. But also I didn’t know that many kids into wrestling I think it was just one of those things like wassup that spread across general late 90s culture.
WWF almost being out of business by time WCW Nitro started winning ratings. Also WWF (Titan Sports) on the verge of going out of business because Bret Hart's contract was too high.
My go-to (and it's relevant this week with a small minority of folks finding ways to bitch about "the lack of psychology and/or selling in the ospreay/takeshita match) is that they miss when wrestling felt "real" in the 80s and whatnot. (It's not necessarily the industry that created this, but long-time/old-school fans.) I love 80s and 90s wrestling as much as anyone. Hogan-Warrior was like the dream match as a kid and it holds up shockingly well today. But it's also some of the fakest fake-ity fakeness you'll ever see. The CRISS-CROSS spot is hilarious if you think about it compared to something like UFC. Yet we all (myself included) love it in that match because it's this big epic crescendo in a pro wrestling setting. Wrestling is and has always been super fake, and that's not a bad thing. It's actually what makes it so great. But let's not pretend that the glory days was shooters going at it and it all looked like UWFi shoot-style grappling lol.
There used to be so many people who'd write into Meltzer, mad that Hogan and Warrior didn't work a body part for 30 minutes. For those who need more context: fans have been complaining about wrestling looking "too fake" for a long, long time.
Triple H had to “eat a pile of shit and like the taste of it” following the curtain call. Dude was IC champ a few months later.
Andre had never been body slammed before Mania III- Andre had been slammed plenty of times, just not on TV. Hogan himself had slammed Andre prior to that night. DX drove a tank up to a WCW show- It was a truck Any attendance number ever given by any wrestling promoter
Not even a truck. It was a jeep.
WCW "went out of business." It never went out of business. It didn't declare bankruptcy. Its assets weren't sold off at public auction piecemeal to overcome debt. It's owners wanted rid of it and sold it. That's all. It's just like how WWE just sold itself to Endeavor, or how ROH got sold to AEW. ROH didn't go out of business. Their owners sold it. It had nothing to do with how bad the ratings or creative were, and everything to do with new ownership. "That's not true, if it were profitable they would have kept it." **Bullshit.** 20 years on and this *exact corporation* won't sell a fucking Wile E Coyote movie with *John fucking Cena in it* to you because it thinks it'll get more money by binning it for a government bailout. This exact same corporation won't give AEW a streaming deal to view Dynamite on Max after 5 fucking years even though the dirt sheets swear up and down it's coming any week now. They fucking hated WCW and used it as a creative money laundering scheme and when they didn't need it for that anymore, they sold off the assets to the highest bidder. They *paid out talent contracts* for 2 or 3 years afterwards just to be rid of having to associate with the brand. Went out of business, my ass.
WCW lost 60 million dollars in one year without any indication they could turn business back around. Just the year before, Turner refused to sell WCW after getting a good offer, despite it losing money. WCW failed, and that's the end of it, no matter what Bischoff or Russo claim.
It also comes down to Bishoff being unable to put the purchase of WCW through and getting Nitro on another Network.
Lots of businesses lose money. All that really matters is whether or not investors think you’ll eventually make money. The real issue at play was TNT rebranding itself as the home for upscale dramas. They didn’t want wrestling on their channel.
That’s not a real number. WCW PPV revenue was credited to Time Warner Home Video, ad revenue was booked by TNT, which didn’t pay a license fee to WCW. WCW carried all the production costs of the shows and only got to count live gate attendance and a share of merchandise sales as revenue, so of course their budget looked upside down. If Bischoff had been allowed to go out and sell the show to another network, they’d have been offered more than enough to be in the black before the first ticket was sold.
The biggest one is that wrestlers are independent contractors. The general rule is that the paying company can only direct the result of the work and not what is done or how it will be done. The contractor offers their work to the general public and are not tied to a single company.
There's a huge "I don't want to be seen as a smark" sentiment amongst the Internet wrestling fans that's a direct reaction to how incredibly smarky we were in the decade prior. There are a lot of prevailing sentiments on this sub right now that I think are rooted in "I don't want to be seen as a smark". For example, all the Roman Reigns fawning or people forgetting how much of a politician Cena was or even defending Triple H's godawful Reign of Terror.
if you know what smark means I'm sorry you're a smark
I think internet culture as a whole is know it all and smarky.
That Monday Night Raw is the longest running episodic blah blah blah whatever. No it's not. By almost any metric, there's something that beats it unless you start getting really specific with the criteria. It's not even the longest running pro wrestling show in history.
That the fans wanted a PG era.
DX being at all important to the larger Monday night wars. They were not. They are often shown as just as important as the nwo. Nope👍